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How
to Start a Novel: The Willingness to be the Best and
the Worstby
Albyn Leah HallAuthor
of The Rhythm of the Road: A Novel

Writing fiction is like allowing yourself to
be the ugliest person in the room and the most beautiful
person at the same time. The beautiful you
swans into the party, garnering admiration, presuming
that everyone else will be interested in what you have to
say -- about anything. The ugly you would
prefer to cower in the kitchen, scoffing leftovers in the
dark.

Its a schizoid existence. The part of you that is
dying to be heard is chronically at odds with the part of
you that fears exposure, rejection, or being just plain
bad, which brings me to my next point. In order to write
a novel, you must be willing to be bad. This is
especially true in the first draft; it is, arguably, what
the first draft is for. (Or, in keeping with the analogy,
in order to be beautiful, you must be ugly first.)

There is no easy way to do this. Every writer has his or
her own way of wrestling with the demons, and I
cant tell you how to wrestle with yours. However, I
can suggest some techniques which I use when starting a
novel; simple strategies which help to free me from my
inhibitions and create a space for the work to emerge.

1)
When you begin a novel, rather than thinking you must
write for, say, a minimum of four to six hours a day, try
only to write for one hour maximum.
This means you may write for no more than one hour! Most
of us harbor an image of the tortured writer; the pacing,
hair-pulling novelist locked up in a chicken shed while
the world spins without him. And yet, while writing
inevitably entails some pain and struggle, the stereotype
of the suffering, workaholic writer is your enemy.

The first draft is when you must pull something out of
nothing: words from the ether, or from your unconscious.
If you impose a tough regime upon it before it has had a
chance to breathe, you will stifle it. If, rather, you
write in bite-sized pieces, tantalizing yourself with
just a little each day, then eventually you will want to
write more, and take delicious pleasure in breaking your
own rule. (However, while you dont have to write
much each day, it is important to write every day,
including Sunday, even if that means just a quick
scribble before brushing your teeth -- youve still
observed the rule.)

Lest you think this sounds frivolous -- a hobbyist
approach to writing -- I must confess that there was a
time when I thought the same thing. I didnt
understand why I couldnt write for hours, or even,
sometimes, minutes; why I spent most of my time staring
at my computer screen longing to be anywhere but there.
It was a severe blow to my sense of identity; I was a
writer who could not write! When a friend suggested the
hour max rule, I tried it with reluctance. A year later,
I had written my first novel.

In later drafts, you will probably want to write for
longer. This is great, so long as you bear in mind that
good writing doesnt always come from abundance. I
can think of many days in which I have produced far more
inspired writing after one hour than on other days when I
wrote for six.

2)
Write your first draft in longhand. This doesnt mean you have to write the
entire draft this way, but write each chapter or section
by hand before transferring it to the computer. The
computer tends to make us feel that we must be excellent
immediately. We are daunted by the pristine white space
before us, which we think we must fill with something
polished and literary. Writing by hand, ideally in some
tatty old notebook, gives you permission to be messy and
primitive. (The notebook is also far more portable. If
youre sick of your four walls, shake up your
routine; write in cafes, parks, trains. Occasionally, the
noise of the natural world can help rather than hinder, a
welcome relief from the more punitive voices of your own
head.)

It isnt until my second or maybe third draft that I
do what I tastefully call mining the vomit for
gold, transferring the work to computer, and in the
process, honing the quality of the writing itself. But
for now, its a mess, and if it isnt, it
should be. Scrawl and scribble; spew it out. This is as
true for work that is autobiographical and work that
isnt remotely autobiographical; as true for comedy
as an epic period novel. Like good dreams and bad dreams,
it all comes from the same place. If you give yourself
time to dwell there, literature will follow
when it is good and ready.

3)
Stay away from the phone, internet and emails until you
have written for the day.
In keeping with this, it is a good idea to write early,
not only because you will be less distracted by the
clutter of the day, but because you will be closer to
your unconscious mind and dream state. Even if you only
write for fifteen minutes, the quality of your attention
will be much, much better if you have not yet filled your
head with other people and the many things you have to
do. Even something as prosaic as shopping for lunch or
having the car fixed can throw you off completely.
Youll be amazed by how difficult it feels at first,
removed from your social fixes. This is a
sobering reminder of just how addicted we are to these
things, and how often we use them to procrastinate! (Yet
it is also a liberating, if humbling, experience to
realize that our friends, colleagues, and household
chores can usually hang on without us for a little
longer.)

4)
When you start a novel, do not worry about having a great
story.
The search for the great story is, in my
view, overrated. I speak only partly in jest when I say
that there are roughly half a dozen stories in the world
and most books are variations upon them. The story is
only as interesting as the person who is telling it. If
you have a strong voice, the reader will follow it
through anything. You can write a wonderful book which,
on the surface, simply describes a party (think of Mrs.
Dalloway, or The Dead) or a dreadful book about a prison
break or espionage.

When people ask how I worked out the story for my latest
novel, The Rhythm of the Road, I reply that I
didnt, to start with. I found Josephine, my young
heroine, and she told me the story. How did I find
Josephine? One night, I was watching a documentary about
a middle-aged housewife who stalks a young priest,
convinced that he shares her obsession. I wondered what
it would take for a person to become so delusional that
she is driven to behave this way. Josephine, a teenage
truck drivers daughter, has little in common with
this woman, but the first glimmer was ignited on that
evening, by my own curiosity. Like giving birth, I
conceived her, but she seemed to develop in her own
right. She did so partly through my research, (Im a
great believer in research, which will also help to
develop the story), but also from a place within myself,
a place that could empathize with a young girl so lonely
that she must conjure a fantasy relationship to fill the
void.

In the end, it seemed to be she who was introducing me to
her lonely Irish father, to the hitchhiker who becomes
the object of her attention, and so on. When I could
finally see how the book was unraveling, I did sit down
and work out an outline for the entire story. But I could
not do this until I had Josephines voice.

So remember that a story can begin in all sorts of ways,
no matter how prosaic: with a question, with the way a
piece of music makes you feel, with a joke, a dream, a
memory, a three minute conversation you overhear in a
bus. You can find an entire universe in a single moment.

Of course, I am only one writer and this is only one set
of tools. Yet whether they work for you, I believe that
the underlying philosophy applies to all writers of
fiction; to write anything good, you must first be
willing to take the ugly, messy, chaotic self out into
the light, take it for a run, let it tell you where to
go.

One of the greatest compliments ever paid to me as a
writer was you must feel pretty good about yourself
to let yourself feel this bad. And yet, the funny
thing is that once I do allow myself to feel this
bad, it doesnt feel too bad at all. At the
very least, Ive gotten a novel or two out of it.

Author
Albyn Leah Hall is the author of two novels: The Rhythm
of the Road (published by St. Martins Press,
January 2007; $24.95US/$31.00CAN; 0-312-35944-6) and
Deliria, (published by Serpents Tail, 1994.) She is
also a screenwriter; her screenplay, The Rose of Tralee,
is currently in development. Albyns childhood was
divided between New York and Los Angeles, but she has
spent most of her adult life in London, where she works
as both a writer and a psychotherapist.